A cloud is a cloud is a cloud is a cloud. Or so it seems to Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, which has just announced that 87 percent of its customer cloud usage "comes from customers using more than one cloud provider and cloud type."

"This confirms the growing trend to leverage multiple clouds - public, private and hybrid - to meet IT needs such as high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery, application performance and reduced cost," the company said in an official release.

Interviewed by Cloud Computing Journal, Crandell said that taking a multi-cloud approach "is part of our strategy and what we've been doing for some time. A key stat (for us) is how much CPU power is under management by RightScale - it is super-important for our customers to have more than one than
cloud (to work with)."

He continued, noting that "the end conclusion is we can measure (our) importance to customers by how much power they're using (within their multiple clouds). Some may be public and private and some may be public and public."



The Universal Remote
RightScale has long sought to deliver a "universal remote" control to its customers, to run on
top of infrastructure-cloud APIs. "Our value is from the API up," Crandell noted. "Providing a compatible API doesn't solve the whole problem involving questions of automation, governance, pre-made workloads, and dynamic configuration. So based on our experience, in our experience, we're providing a bridge between low-level APIs and applications."

RightScale has six public cloud partners - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Datapipe, the IDC Frontier (IDCF) subsidiary of Yahoo Japan, Logicworks, Rackspace and SoftLayer - and partners with private cloud software providers Citrix CloudStack, Eucalyptus and OpenStack Cloud.

The company also partners with Equinix to allow connect their own private clouds with public clouds that already exist in an Equinix data center. "You can house whatever you want in your own data center with a very high-speed connection into AWS," Crandell said.

The Single Pane of Glass
In short, according to Crandell "the win (with RightScale) is cloud architecture in general. We're a consumption enabler on Amazon." He also noted that though he believes AWS customers are loyal - "there's not a lot of switching back-and-forth" but that many AWS customers want to run internal private clouds. "In general, that doesn't take anything away from Amazon. It means that customers now have a single pane of glass (through which) they can run workloads here or there."

RightScale's announcement comes just a few days after Eucalyptus and AWS announced that their customers can now migrate workloads across both environments. As Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos said in an official statement last week, "The ability to develop against a common set of market-leading APIs, for both on-premise and cloud deployments, is a big benefit for our customers and software partners. This agreement is going to accelerate our roadmap, and help us maintain our compatibility with AWS as both companies continue to innovate."

Regarding the RightScale announcement, David Butler, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Eucalyptus noted in that "the demand for hybrid cloud capabilities is on the rise as enterprises look for ways to dynamically scale their applications. Through our integration with RightScale myCloud, customers can create AWS-compatible clouds that enable applications to be scaled between on-premise and public clouds in a matter of minutes."

Additionally, John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, said that "RightScale provides our customers the flexibility (our customers need) along with (that) single pane of glass for managing multi-region Rackspace deployments alongside private cloud deployments."

Multi-cloud. Single pane of glass. Universal remote. A bridge. All terminology that indicates a new era of cloud computing, in which sophisticated customers are requiring solutions that transcend the industry's original public/private/hybrid terminology. A cloud by any other name...